The Mast-Head: Name-Dropping
So I was in New York City briefly last Thursday for an opening at my friend Eric Firestone’s gallery loft on Great Jones Street. New York is a big place, and the chance of bumping into someone I know from Amagansett is pretty low.
There were a few people I knew at the opening, a retrospective of work from the 1970s and ’80s by the late Miriam Schapiro, but I had to get to Midtown to catch the 10:15 bus back to East Hampton and did not stick around for the after-party. My wife, Lisa, says some of our readers enjoy a little name-dropping from time to time, so I indulge.
Why anyone at all cares about celebrities is a mystery to me; I’ve often wondered if it were not some kind of primal instinct handed down from when our forebearers’ species evolved, a deep-seated desire to get close to the alpha male, the big silverback ape, for social and biological reasons. Today, though, we might put a signed photograph, of, say, the president, up on the wall instead.
Leaving the gallery, I walked up Lafayette Place, passing the Public Theater, and heard a man’s voice that sounded really familiar. Now I’ve never seen his show, but Jerry Seinfeld and his wife, Jessica, passed diagonally in front of me and got in the back of a black Mercedes sedan.
“Odd,” I thought, “We have houses no more than a couple of miles apart in Amagansett, and I cross paths with them in the city.”
Heading north with a little time to kill, I crossed over to Broadway and stopped to get a cup of tea. Taking a seat by a window, I saw Alec Baldwin, another part-time Amagansett resident, outside in a jacket and tie. He had two small dogs on a leash and was in what looked like brief conversation with a passer-by. I resisted the temptation to knock on the glass.
Alec and I know each other well enough from around; I have not encountered the Seinfelds here, except once when he was tearing down Cranberry Hole Road, where I live, in one of his many fine sports cars and another time when I passed his kids’ infamous outlaw lemonade stand last summer.
The South Fork is fairly lousy with film and television people these days. One of my close friends, an actor with a house in Sag Harbor, was in a Super Bowl commercial, and in the fall I ran into another famous actor I know hanging out in the Tackle Shop in Amagansett.
The Tackle Shop is run by Harvey Bennett, apropos of name-dropping, and he is the bigger silverback, so to speak, as far as I am concerned. Mr. Seinfeld? Alec? Get in line.